19730505_AM

Source: BBC1: The Ascent of Man

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2kiAF1GL9M

Date: 05/05/1973

Event: The Ascent of Man, Episode 1: Lower Than the Angels

Credit: BBC, also Fay Kelly Tuncay for transcribing this.

People:

• Jacob Bronowski: Mathematician, biologist, historian of science

Jacob Bronowski: Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape - he is the shape of the landscape.

Every landscape in the world is full of exact and beautiful adaptations, by which and animal fits into its environment like one cogwheel into another. But nature, that is evolution, has not fitted man into any specific environment.

On the contrary, he has a rather crude survival kit, and yet this is the paradox of the human condition, one that fits him to all environments. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety, and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment, but to change it. And that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution, not biological, but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks - the ascent of man.

[Picture of cave paintings.]

In these paintings the hunter was made familiar with danger which he knew he had to face, but to which he had not yet come. When the hunters were brought here they see the dark and the light was brought and suddenly flashed on the pictures he saw the bison as he would have to face him. The moment of fear was made present to him, his spear arm flexed with the experience, which he would have, and which he needed not to be afraid of.

I think that the power that we see expressed here for the first time is the power of the forward looking imagination. The imagination is a telescope in time we are looking back at the experiences of the past.

The men who made these paintings, the men who were present, looked through that telescope forward. They looked along the ascent of man. Because what we call cultural evolution, is essentially, a constant growing and widening of the human imagination.

The men who made the weapons, and the men who made the paintings, were doing the same thing - anticipating a future as only man can do, inferring what is to come, from what is here. All over these caves the print of the hand says that: this is may mark - this is man.

We are all afraid for our confidence - for the future - for the world. That’s the nature of the human imagination. Yet, every man, every civilisation has gone forward, because of engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill. The intellectual commitment, and the emotional commitment, working together as one, has made the ascent of man.

Man is unique, not because he does science, and he is unique, not because he does art, but because science and art, are equally expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind.

[To be continued.]